Here’s the first joke in the first episode of the first season of The Office: Michael Scott mistaking a woman for a man. He ends a phone call with the flourish of “You’re a gentleman and a scholar!” before being corrected by the person on the other end, and then justifies it by saying, “She had a very low voice.” A joke, about a minute later, is Michael saying of Pam, “If you think she’s cute now, you should have seen her a couple years ago” and then making vaguely dog-like growls. By 20 minutes in, he’s made her cry. One episode later, he refuses to sign a pledge to not make racist jokes anymore.
What saves that second joke is Pam’s dismayed “What?”—her clear exasperation at having to put up with this fuckin’ guy every day setting the tone for the show. The point is to laugh at Michael Scott’s incompetence. The butt of the joke is the sexist, racist fool of a boss, and if you are taking his jokes at face value, you don’t understand what’s going on.
The Office (both the British and American versions, though we’re talking about the American one here) is about a deeply toxic workplace, where the humor comes from the painful truth that this is what it’s like. But it’s maybe worth it to sit with the show at face value for a second. In light of all the upheaval over workplace harassment, with people (in some industries, sometimes) finally having the courage to come forward and name abusers, I have to say The Office is hard to watch. Whereas it was once seen as exaggeration, it’s now run up against Poe’s Law: too close to be satire.
I hate this. I love The Office. One of my favorite jokes ever: when Mindy Kaling says she has a reason for wearing white to a wedding, and it cuts to her saying, “I look really good in white.” But upon rewatching, it feels like we’re supposed to be laughing just because they’re naming the problem.
The (white, male) employees in the show who make their co-workers’ lives a living hell are constantly saying things that anyone in a toxic workplace has heard, whether it’s Michael saying, “I’m a friend first and a boss second,” or Dwight’s “People sometimes take advantage because it’s so relaxed.” It’s horribly true, and that’s the joke. Compare that to how VICE employees complaining of sexual harassment were told it was a “non-traditional workplace.” Or when faced with HR training on sexual harassment, Michael protests, “Okay, what is a lawyer going to come in and tell us? To not send out hilarious e-mails or not tell jokes?” How different is that from men who say they “can’t even feel safe saying ‘good morning’ anymore”?
The problem is that the victims of these shenanigans in The Office, whether it’s Michael forwarding joke e-mails about child molestation to his employees or Dwight saying whatever sexist and homophobic things he believes, never get their day. Complaints to HR or professional-conduct trainings are ignored or handled ineffectively, in an attempt to skewer the ineptitude of HR bureaucracy that tends to ignore how necessary those trainings are. Michael is never taken seriously—sometimes slapped, even—but he is begrudgingly tolerated and forgiven and never fired. In later seasons, we’re even asked to feel sorry for him, to cheer him on in his relationships (many of which are with co-workers). But even when he’s at his most horrible, there’s always someone with that dismayed “What?,” a supposed salve to remind us we’re on their side.
If Michael is the obvious villain, then Jim, the erstwhile hero, is the man who sees the abuse and stays silent for his own benefit. Jim is the audience stand-in, whose fourth-wall breaks have become a standard meme reaction when anyone is being obviously ridiculous. While the show laughs at Michael through layers of irony, Jim is the one we’re supposed to look to for how to feel. And mostly, he feels like the horrors of the workplace are none of his business.
Jim isn’t touched by the horrors his boss inflicts on others because Michael sees him as an equal, mostly because he is a young, “cool” man. Therefore, he can roll his eyes and laugh and cringe and leave it all behind when he clocks out. He is never the target. He can hate the right people, prank the right people, because he can pretend he’s one of them. He and others even help Michael start his own company, willingly working with him after how often he’s proven himself to have failed upwards. Everyone on the show is a little bit complicit, but Jim feels like the guy you tell about your trauma, only to have him commiserate and then do nothing.
There’s a voice in my head telling me I’m reading too much into this. I am telling myself that, despite my knowing and writing that the abusers on the show are the villains and not the heroes, I just don’t get it. That I’m taking it too seriously and have lost the ability to find humor in the situation, in reality. And honestly, that’s about right. I have lost that ability. Years of watching and enduring and living with the behavior they’re skewering make the jokes turn to ash. Times have changed, and I can’t look at Michael, Jim, or anyone else the same way. I don’t want to be this way. This was done to me.
The Office is not the only show to rely on your cringe-laughing because you’ve been too close to a situation. But its humor, and its problems, come from it being a situation most of us can’t avoid. Most people have bosses and co-workers. Most people have been in a position where they have to decide between taking a stand and keeping their job. The Office let us laugh at our own misery, but also excused us from doing anything more than watching as the objective wrongs aren’t righted, and occasionally glancing to the side, hoping some invisible audience sees what’s going on. We were told it was okay to be the Jim. Now I know it’s as bad as being the Michael.